


Little Big Soldier

by chaoticamanda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 12:20:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1469605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticamanda/pseuds/chaoticamanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was ten, he remembers knowing for the first time that being the son of John Winchester meant being a good little soldier. Good soldiers protected their little brothers, even if it means sacrificing fun things, a lesson that he had learned the hard way. He remembers the disappointment in his father’s eyes, and he has never forgotten the guilt of letting Sammy get hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Big Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> Short oneshot that I wrote to get over some writer's block. Feel free to leave a comment.

When he was five, he remembers that he didn’t like to talk. He missed his mother every day and sometimes pretended that she was a pillow and still with him. He remembers waking up in the middle of the night and seeing his father at the crummy little table, head bowed over a drink, dark circles so sunken into his father’s face that he can’t remember the man without them. He remembers the astounding silence the most. 

When he was seven, he remembers his father taking him out shooting. Making his father proud was important to him, and since he didn’t play t-ball anymore, he tried his hardest. His father was different, taking him and his little brother everywhere, never staying in one place. They had a lot of babysitters. The babysitters usually gave him a lot of sad looks when they thought he couldn’t see. 

When he was ten, he remembers knowing for the first time that being the son of John Winchester meant being a good little soldier. Good soldiers protected their little brothers, even if it means sacrificing fun things, a lesson that he had learned the hard way. He remembers the disappointment in his father’s eyes, and he has never forgotten the guilt of letting Sammy get hurt. 

When he was twelve, he remembers being fully shaped into the structure of a soldier. He knew what was expected of him, and he knew that failure would not be tolerated. Every night he would repeat this over and over to himself, snapping a rubber band against his wrist until he got it right. He never has. To please his father, he builds a sawed-off shotgun from scratch, but Sammy has done well in school and that is better. 

When he was sixteen, he remembers both embracing his life as a “hunter”, or so his father calls it, and the urge to tear himself free from it even if it left him tattered. He killed a living thing, but his father said that it was bad, that it was hurting people like his mother had been hurt. He believed his father. He looked up to him. When his father left him to the boy’s home, he told himself he deserved the punishment, because that was what John had thought. It was a sort of dishonorable discharge. He had his first kiss, but he shoved it deep, deep down when his father had come back to claim him. 

When he was twenty, he remembers being free, being young for the just shortest time. He knew that it would not last and he knew that being a hunter was something that could not be ripped from your soul, not once you started. He comes back to his father and his brother, because he is nothing and they are something and that is all he has. 

When he was twenty-four, he remembers the silence returning. His little brother has abandoned him and his father, gone off to pursue an education. His father is never happy, not for one moment. The lines in his father’s face will sink there forever, he thinks. He thinks of his mother at night when he can’t sleep. It is easy to imagine in the silence that Sam is with her, that Sam did not choose to leave his brother behind. 

When he was twenty-eight, he remembers being happy. Sam is with him again, but his father is not. He is used to his father’s disappearances, accepts it right up until the man dies. He feels the weight of the world on his shoulders, because his father, his commander had given him one final order. Kill your brother or save him. He thinks deep in his heart that he can not do either, but he will try. After all, Sam is the only something left in his life and he needs Sam. He does not need himself. 

When he was thirty, he remembers feeling a pressing weight in his gut that was uncomfortable, but not unmanageable. He has died. He has been through Hell. But air is coming into his lungs again and the world seems so big. He is told that he’s a good man, but he knows that he is a bad soldier. He could not contain his brother, he could not contain Lucifer himself if he tried. The world seems upside down but he keeps driving because there is nothing else he can do. 

 

When he was thirty-four, he remembers the purity he had found in a place meant for filth. He wanted his brother, but his brother didn’t want him. If John was alive, he’d tell his son to take what came at him like a man. He remembers getting tired in an empty sort of way. Emptiness was nothing new, though.

He is thirty-six now. When he looks in the mirror he sees John staring back at him and when he sits down at a table he can feel his brother’s cold silence from miles away. He feels like a monster and he is tired and he is angry. It doesn’t matter. It never has. There is a rage inside of him, a sickness that’s finished incubating. He knows he is not strong enough to defeat it, and so he gives in. It feels good. 

He will be thirty-seven. Every war he has ever lived for is over and everyone he will have ever loved will have left him to rot quietly by himself. He will sit down in a creaking, dirty bed with a bottle in his hand. He will take a drink. He will take out his special gun, the one that could kill anything. He will think of his mother, his father, and finally his brother. The silence will push down on his soul until he is so numb he will barely feel the weight of the weapon in his hand as he raises it. He will pull the trigger. It feels good.


End file.
